Study: E-Cigarettes Can Increase Flu Risk

Trending News: Study Suggests E-Cigs Can Weaken The Immune System

Why Is This Important?

Because debate is raging on whether e-cigarettes really are a healthy option.

Long Story Short

A study from John Hopkins University in Maryland has shown that mice exposed to e-cigarette vapour were less able to fight off illness.

Long Story

Electronic cigarettes may not be so safe after all with a report suggesting that they may harm the body’s defence against flu and pneumonia.Tests were performed on mice by scientists at John Hopkins University in Maryland and came up with some interesting data. Mice were exposed to proportionally the amount of e-cigarette vapor a person would inhale then some were given the influenza virus, which causes pneumonia, sinusitis and other diseases.

When compared to a control group, the mice who had been exposed to the vapor were less able to fight off illnesses and some died, as was revealed by the results published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“We have observed that [e-cigarettes] increase the susceptibility to respiratory infections in mouse models,” study author Professor Shyam Biswal is quoted as saying by the Independent. “This warrants further study in susceptible individuals such as COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) patients who have switched from cigarettes to e-cigarettes or to new users of e-cigarettes who may never have used cigarettes.”

These are still early days for e-cigarettes and while they have aided many smokers in quitting and are widely agreed to be less dangerous than regular cigarettes, there is still uncertainty over the impact vaping has on the body.

It has recently emerged that free radical chemicals previously believed to only be found in tobacco cigarettes and air pollutants are also present in e-cigarette vapours, but the amounts are generally around 100 times lower.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Are e-cigarettes really safe?

Disrupt Your Feed: We need to work out if vaping is safe quickly before we end up dealing with a generation of side effect sufferers.

Drop This Fact: In a November 2014 study commissioned by the Japanese Ministry of Health, a number of e-cigarette products were found to have 10 times the level of cancer-causing carcinogens of normal cigarettes.